However, there is good news and now there is bad news. The good news is that consumers are being protected from hazards that could cause severe damages or even life threatening situations. Some batteries were found to set laptops on fire. Fortunately, companies were quick to take action and batteries were swapped rather quickly. The bad news is that so many batteries were recalled and not enough were replaced, causing a global shortage of batteries.

Analysts are saying that battery supply is currently at critically low levels on a global scale. Despite being the world's largest lithium cell manufacturer, Sanyo does not have the capacity to supply replacement orders. Samsung SDI Co. also manufactures lithium cells but it too is running low on supply. Nexcell Battery, a Taiwan-based battery manufacturer that produces batteries from cells supplied by Sanyo and Sony said that cells are now very difficult to come by. Eric Lai, manager at Nexcell Battery said "if we ask for small amounts, we might be able to get supply, but if we order large amounts of more than 2000 cells then you can forget about it."

Because of the global shortage, battery prices are also on the rise. According to analysts, prices have jumped as much as 15 percent. IBM, Apple, Lenovo, Hitachi, Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu, Sharp and many other companies worldwide announced recalls over the last several months. In fact, it's reported that Sony is in the process of destroying over 43 million cells as part of the overall recall. This is as much as 10.8 million batteries said Eric Yu, manager at ETI Pack in Taiwan.

Sony itself has not revealed publicly how many companies in total have recalled batteries that used its cells, and the company is also tight lipped about how much money this recall is costing. So far however, Sony has budgeted at least $251 million for the recall project. Sony now faces stiffer competition from rivals. LG Chem Ltd., South Korea's largest battery manufacturer gained several new customers that were previously ordering from Sony. Celxpert Energy Corp., a supplier for Acer and HP said "we originally bought 30 percent of our battery cells from Sony but have lowered that to almost zero because of quality concerns."

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

You rudely insult the OP's grammar, while making several grammatical mistakes of your own. You are then downvoted for this reason. One person insults your nationality, and you claim everyone that downvotes you is a racist.

Question, if there were so many racists running around DailyTech, why wouldn't your posts have been downvoted before now? I'm tempted to downvote you just for your puerile (lol, the American used a big word) behavior. But I'm not going to.

I think DailyTech news reporters should a mendatory "preview" option like we have now on the comment section (well..have sometimes..I don't know why but sometimes I can post without having to click preview before).

Now my understanding of the english language is not perfect because like I said it is my second language.

If saying "Sometimes those errors are really fun to read." is being rude I'm sorry for what I said because being rude was far from my idea when I made this post.

Now if you look closely I said those errors and the OP of this news only did one so I was talking here about some of the many errors we daily see on Dailytech, not this one
in particular. As for the second paragraph it was meant as a joke. Here again I fail to see how this was being rude.

Now if I made a general statement on people being racist on anand/daily tech is because of all the post I read every day on those site that are racist, be it agains the French, the Chiness or the arabic comunity in general. Now on the same topic I only began to talk about racist when I was said to be an "elitist french" and that suddently after that post(the one that tagged me as en elitist french)all my previous comments droped down. It's only after seeing that that I made the racist statement. Again I'm sorry as it was not directed at the entire dailytech comunity but at those are in fact racist. You may not be aware of this but many people have no idea of the meaning of my nickname so most of the time unless I'm tagged as a French-Canadian or a French people just don't know it.

As for you last comment I'm surfing the net since 14 years when it was just plain .txt files with sometimes 1 little picture, but sometimes I'm still suprise of how can some people be that immature. Exemple: the one who voted down almost every post I made this month, yesterday around 8h30 east time. Another exemple: the fact that all my post are voted down on this same topic while many of them are simply explanation or answer(like my aproval of not correcting grammar when you can even spell grammar correctly) to other person that at least dare to talk to me and not just put on a negative rating. I understand voting down some post that you didn't like but voting down all the posts made by the op of the post you didn't like because he wrote it, excuse me but it's just plain childish.

Now I keep posting to explain or respond to people for what I posted before even if I know people will just for the fun of it give me again and again negative rating. Why, because I just don't care about my rating, but I care about what people think of me and try my best with every post to explain what and why I did.